OT: Spurrier gets the banhammer

This is just, like, unsourced message board yammering from having read other message board yammering, so take it FWIW. But there are almost always two sides to every story, and I doubt Spurrier would have just capriciously woke up one day and decided to yank the scholarship just to play games. (Ugh, I hate defending Steve Spurrier.) But depending on who you believe, the scholarship was offered by a DB coach who didn't really consult the HC or DC and has since moved on. Also: potential academic problems, kid might have been playing games with SC, etc. In any case I doubt there's "no apparent reason." It's always something. Dunno how much is true. But a couple rhetorical questions ought to be considered before hammering Spurrier. (Again: defending Spurrier = ugh.) - Why do players take little to no heat for decommitting (except from psycho fans of the jilted school) but coaches are hammered for essentially doing the same? People even made excuses for that dude who faked his recruiting and "committed" to Cal - oh, he just wanted attention, it's a meat market, high pressure world, lot of stress, just wanted to fit in, etc. etc. Pulling a scholarship offer is a decommitment in reverse. Maybe a little bit worse because coaches are supposed to be the adults, but things change at programs just like they change for recruits. - What if there really were genuine academic issues, or loss of trust issues or something? What's worse: pulling the scholarship and giving the kid a month to find a new landing spot, or letting him come to school with known academic problems, and wasting a year of eligibility on a transfer or something if he can't hack it?

The student relies heavily on the fact that he has a schollie and tells other schools that he is no longer interested in their school. The opoportunities that he loses when he committed to SC in reliance on their offer are pretty significant. I realize that when a kid decommits, the team in question has to turn around and find another player at that position and that the team lost the chance to recruit other highly-rated prospects. But this is a question of the extent of the impact. There are dozens of prospects willing to take that student's place so the impact on the team (from a decommitted student) is far less than the impact on the student (who gets a schollie yanked). This is kid now looking at the University of Alabama at Birmingham instead of the better suitors he had before. There will always be another lineman or safety coming down the line for a school that has a prospect decommit. But this kid only gets to do this once and to have Spurrier box him in to a lousier school/program is pretty lame. If the DB Coach made an offer that he shouldn't have, then that is a managment problem on Spurrier's part and not the kid's fault, the school should honor it nonetheless. At the very least, they should have handled that kind of screw up at the time the offer was made and not waited a month pull the rug out from under the kid.